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If you follow political, economic, scientific or cultural life – anything outside the everyday and personal – you may have noticed that the future keeps getting cancelled.

We latch onto a hope that something positive and progressive will come about – the full Brexit catastrophe won’t actually happen, fascist bullies won’t win power, wars in Syria and Yemen will be resolved peacefully, a new way to stop climate change will be found and progressive social movements will bring back some democratic power to people. Repeatedly and rapidly these hopeful havens come undone.

The contemporary, with these frequent shocks coming in quick or even simultaneously through the medium of fast media, is a strange place to inhabit, a seizure of confusion, ‘lossy’ to use Nathan Jones’s words here. The narratives we reassure ourselves with, the analyses, the explanations, the predictions, very quickly come unstuck as events unfold beyond our grasp.

There has to be a positive conception of the future in order to survive and get on with things. In order to resist aggressively there has to be a vision of a future to move towards. And there will inevitably always be a future despite how grim it appears in our present. Cancellation has not actually happened; to say that there is no alternative to our present paralyses just as much as the disappointment that the future we had in mind has not materialised.

Artists, musicians and poets and writers keep forming utopian strategies in the hope that some ideas will catch up / catch on. So the antithesis of Future/No Future is the theme for this issue. Nathan Jones, Peter Finch, Elizabeth-Jane Burnett and Ailbhe Darcy explore the anxious experience of a future-present with its disappointments, its insistencies. Nicky Arscott, Cris Paul and Gareth Leaman consider dystopia and utopia. Harry Giles gives us science fiction poetry in Scots, coincidentally anticipating Nihaal Faizal’s discovery of sketches made in the sci fi future. Meirion Jordan offers a warning for the future of Welsh language culture. Many other poets included here give us their latest which in itself is a futurism in language. Meanwhile Miriam Elin Jones asks why there are no poets in future Wales, or at least in Welsh language science fiction.

This Cymruddyfodoliaeth – Cambrofuturism – is in fact one of the inspirations for this issue. The fact that a small oppressed minority culture can think big and think forward, at the prompting of Afrofuturism and Afro-pessimism, is quite a spur. Instead of turning, as we so often do here, to the nostalgic past, these writers and artists imagine something else ahead. Chwyldro. Cymruddyfodoliaeth is both pessimistic and optimistic. With a utopian hope, a dystopian rationalism and a necessary radicalism. On her recent Cambrofuturistic album Gwenno echoes Saunders Lewis’s stark 1962 warning Tynged yr Iaith , (The future of the language). She sings (and translates):

Don’t, don’t forget that your heart is in the revolution
don’t forget that, your heart is in the revolution

Raymond Williams wrote that to be radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. But how to make hope that helps us survive without placing our selves in false refuges, distractions from the need to act? We can now note that revolutionary hope can probably never be one promised land, a singular utopian deliverance, but many turnings towards the sun and back to earth. After all, dystopia is already here and it is far more complex and glitchy than fiction has presented it thus far.

Our dystopian present continually contradicts the already-past imagining of the future. And we can really only access the future via this present. So this issue, though it names the future is actually taking measure of the anxious present. Or presents. Peter Finch describes the ‘destination’ of the contemporary after a 1950s childhood of anticipation: ‘It’s an ante chamber stop off layby kerb backroom sidecar flap pocket edge liminal redoubt fog of Sargasso debris dust detritus washed up beach line bust and […more].’ Meanwhile, Nathan Jones makes an extensive exploration of this ‘traumatic time’, ‘that turning out of anticipation’s slack into regret’s puppet’. This is a contradictory moment where the ‘manbaby’ politician-businessman holds violent power over the prematurely aged child refugee. He asks what happens to language in this conflicted moment, imagining the neologism as a refugee camp – a temporary one-use refuge in language overspilling at the fractures of the techno-geological era – the violent warping shifts of the anthropocene.

This present is our only resource for the future and for hope. It can also be beautiful. Elizabeth-Jane Burnett writes of a moment swimming in the water between political leaders, ‘this is the moment/ we own in the shoulders down/no air’, here there are ‘no post-facts unless that means poems’. So this ‘future’ moment is glitch, fluxy, lossy, sublime, poem, an antechamber that bleeds. It insists. What is it. This starts to wonder…

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day with March’s featured poet, Josephine Corcoran, on how she approaches the business of writing a poem.

I was at a Poetry Business Writing Day in Sheffield in January, and poet and tutor Ann Sansom told us not to be surprised if we wrote a finished, or near-finished, poem during the workshop. “You might have been carrying the idea for this poem in your head for weeks, months, or even years,” Ann said, explaining that a writing prompt can sometimes act as the trigger we’ve been missing. This is definitely true for me. I spend a lot of time thinking about poems before I start writing, and then, once I’ve begun a poem, I can spend years trapped inside it, not knowing how to reach the end. Often it’s reading other people’s poems which help me find the way. A lot of the Writing Day prompts were based on poems so this explains why they’re very helpful.

I often work on several poems at once. I tinker with a poem until I’m stuck then move on to another one. In between, I try to keep all my channels open, reading, observing, listening, and jotting down phrases, words, lines in my notebook. It’s all a mystery, really. I wish I could follow the same formula every day and produce a manuscript of poems at the end of every week. The reality is, I’m a slow, daydreamy writer but poems sometimes arrive during a daydream.

Josephine Corcoran’s pamphlet The Misplaced House was published by tall-lighthouse in November 2014. She is the founder and editor of And Other Poems an online poetry journal.

‘Poems themselves like to have a little time for their words to get to know each other — gossip and squabble, fall out and flirt.’

Pay Attention

I used to love catching sight of things happening in the peripheries of my vision. A person precariously swaying towards the traffic on a busy street, as if being propelled from behind by an unseen force, or a small mouse scurrying alongside the rails as an Underground train pulled into Blackfriars station could easily find their way into a poem. Now that I’ve been blind for nine years I try to pay attention to ideas triggered by my other senses. I get more inspired by news from the peripheries rather than the headlines.

Be Sensible

Thirty years of sighted life means I have many visual images stored in my brain. I remember what different colours look like and I can still imagine buildings that I’ve never before seen if I can find a description of the architectural style or the colours and material of the bricks and how the roof is tiled. When I look back over old poems I realise that other senses took a back seat compared to visual images. Nowadays I always take a step back from any poem I am writing and make sure that other senses are not overlooked — I want to let the reader smell the smoking jacket hanging on the banister or hear the sofa springs creak as a person plonks his derriere down, not just what colours the jacket and sofa are.

Breathe

I generally find that I write better poems when I remember to breathe. I’m a firm believer that a poem also needs to have space to breathe. I like to let the poem sit and simmer for a few days giving it chance for its flavours to develop. When you make a cup of tea in a teapot you let your tea brew, and if you’re barbecuing steak you may well let it rest in a marinade to tenderise and let the flavours infuse before cooking. When I finish a draft of a poem I will leave it for a couple of days before coming back to it with rested eyes. Poems themselves like to have a little time for their words to get to know each other — gossip and squabble, fall out and flirt. I like to let the words have that breathing space to loosen up before coming back to me with their own ideas.

Giles L. Turnbull is a blind poet. He spent the first half of his life in North Yorkshire before moving to South Wales to study chemistry at Swansea University. He has lived in South Wales ever since, apart from a 5-year sojourn Stateside and two years in London. His debut pamphlet, Dressing Up, is published by Cinnamon Press.

Giles’s article ‘Embracing the Visual’ – a focus on poetry and disability can be found in Poetry Wales Summer issue 2016, 52.1

January’s poet, and editor of Poetry Wales, kicks us off on a new series of monthly features where we ask a poet to impart their knowledge and experience of writing a poem. How do they do it? What approach do they take? What gets them writing? Each poem is as unique as its author, and so is the writing process, so we bring to you a monthly instalment and a very unique insight into some of Poetry Wales’s poets.

Here is Nia’s succinct (and poetic) approach:

1. Fill up to overflowing on language then breathe out

2. Process, interrogate, translate, listen

3. Eat many forms. Destroy many forms. Remember that many forms bleed

Her forthcoming collection: All Fours is due out with Bloodaxe in June 2017

Bodies. Rhythms. Motion. Sounds. All fours is a debut collection of poetry from Nia Davies, a book of rituals in language that stalk the space between what is uttered and what is meant. These poems are haunted by the strange traces of the longest words in the world and folk-mythic figures such as Sinbad, Eurydice, Mossy Coat, Pan and Baba Yaga. They pose riddles with multiple or mysterious answers.

A swerving sweary jump into a terrain that is both comically musical and perplexedly political,All fours speaks of the (mis)adventures of sex and human communication, a life full-to-bursting with burning questions.

Nia Davies writes rich and adventurous poems. Her work feels borderless, influenced by experimental American and eastern European poetries. In the event that an “I” surfaces in her work, it is defiantly plastic and multivalent.’ – Dai George

How do you fuck up a system from within? asks Aase Berg. The hacker and the parasite are metaphors she uses at length in her new collection Hackers, extracts of which are translated from Swedish by Johannes Görannson in this issue. The hacker and the parasite enter the host culture and wreak havoc from the inside. In her poems the ‘hostess animal’ may be the female body as a space vulnerable to invasion, or that could be reversed – we could, she suggests, hack oppressive structures such as patriarchy out from the inside by using the very language and narratives of those structures. Seeking out and refashioning language she has found on the dark web or in business manuals, Berg’s poetry is full of dystopian scenes, forcings-together of words and strange – often gross – alien creatures. She forges new words into being and makes fierce entries into the ‘world male’, exploding black and white binaries into new complexity. Her new language feels completely necessary at a time when the predominant narratives of our media and politics are oppressively nativist and regressive, xenophobic, dangerously inward looking. The feeling of this state is captured (and challenged) for me in this issue by Nat Raha, in texts written in 2015, prior to Theresa May’s premiership:

Post- 23rd June 2016 the language world of Britain appears broken and out of kilter, with slogans and headlines no longer bothering with any modicum of sensitivity or fact. It has of course always been the case, and poetry knows this, that the language of ‘fact’ is never stable or ‘truthful’; words always have other meanings, right? But then two slogans now come to the fore of my news-addled memory: We send the EU £350M a week, let’s fund our NHS instead and … My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.

There is an extreme turn in public discourse and we swim in its bodily fluids. Words like NHS, freedom, Britain are quickly appropriated for their positive meanings or turned against us in hate-inciting or misleading contortions. Political canvassers tell that they read headlines online from the extreme-right wing press in the morning and hear the exact same language from people on the doorsteps in the afternoon. We are now hearing politicians repeating the racist and regressive rhetoric back at their conferences in order to secure power. We may not be passive swimmers in the language body, the ‘world animal’, as Berg puts it, but we humans do latch on to some narratives over others, we do have a tendency to repeat. Repeat.

But how can poets become like parasites in the body of hegemonic language when we are humans, part of the world animal itself? Hackers may appear to be anonymous but behind their masks they are organisms formed in the world animal. Likewise poets are not separate from the oppressive language body they may seek to shift and contort, they may easily repeat what the world gives them. As in many of the arts now, poetry culture is suffused with privilege of one kind or another. The ubiquity of this privilege, where increasingly those with some helping hand already in place are most often the ones who find the time to write and read, perpetuates inequality further as it creates an increasingly homogenous cultural landscape.

But that’s not to say that poetry is now devoid of working class voices or poets who do not come from typical British privilege. Kate Potts’s essay on the treatment of class in poetry in the UK explores this issue in depth. But it is also notable that the two pieces on recent developments in Welsh language poetry by Llyr Gwyn Lewis and Elan Grug Muse – commissioned by myself and Eurig Salisbury to give some insight on the recent scene for readers of English – mention social class as a defining recent change in the art in Welsh.

I hope to support poets who destabilise the language of the oppressive system from within, and that I, along with others, will also destabilise my own language, to decolonise, deprivilege and decouple words from their violent structures, to re- or de-appropriate and hack until, in Nat Raha’s words ‘division mutually breached’, or we have ‘the negation of england as an island’, or we have fucked the bad system up. In Aase Berg’s words:

‘The parasitical yes eats from within. Twist the hoof back and forth. The thud
of the fifth heart, the three-wheeler, the wood horse!’

In Bellaghy in County Derry a new centre, HomePlace, dedicated to the late poet Seamus Heaney has been built, and opened earlier this month. That such a home place for poetry be built in 2016, that it should be erected here in a quiet village known more for its past than its present or future, that it be supported so keenly by local community and council makes me very hopeful. I was lucky enough to be present at the opening weekend of HomePlace for a festival of poetry, music and talks dedicated to the life and work of Heaney.

There was one particularly special moment. It was not just special because we had to get up very early on a Sunday morning and make our way in the cold to a muddy spot overlooking Church Island in Lough Beg – a feature in the landscape where Heaney imagined so many of his poems. The poem being featured, Mycenae Lookout, is actually set in Ancient Greece and it was a juxtaposition between ‘home’ and ‘away’ that helped make the event special. But it wasn’t just because of this or the gift of whiskey in plastic cups. It was probably Fiona Shaw performing Heaney’s words from in hay cart in a field steeped in mist.

The view behind her was obscured so she was eerily foregrounded and we were thus completely present with her and the poem. ‘Mycenae Lookout’ speaks from the perspective of a watchman at the house of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. He speaks of the queen’s command, of being the ‘blind spot her farsightedness relied on’ and he senses terror and violence far off beyond what he can actually see with his eyes. Shaw embodied his words in her voice and movement and the moment felt extremely vivid in its ‘nowness’, but also ancient. And because the poem speaks of a prophecy of a violent future event, we were also in a future – a past-future.

The watchman speaks of the mist rising from the fields – and it was, slowly but surely rising as dawn broke. The watchman thinks he sees Troy’s battlefields, ‘clouds bloodshot with the red of victory fires’ and indeed a small fire burned in the far bog.

The watchman’s troubled ‘farsightedness’ is a prophecy he is cursed with, stuck between the plotting sexed-up Clytemnestra and the distant Agamemnon’s extreme violence. ‘My sentry work was fate, a home to go to,’ he envisions, ‘What was to come out of that ten years’ wait that was the war / Flawed the black mirror of my frozen stare.’

He sees the future in the present, his fate is a home to go to. So we were here, we were there and we were also in Shaw’s voice and in Heaney’s words and at his home. The past and the present and the future collapsed in this moment.

There is a future for poetry that is both a homecoming and an adventure. In this way HomePlace is both a return and a setting out. HomePlace gives hope that such a homecoming will this time not be bloody. However Heaney was not shortsighted as to the challenges faced or the violence experienced in far, or not so far, places. ‘Mycenae Lookout’ is an uncanny poem and this was an uncanny moment of hope and sympathy with victims of violence, past, present and future.

My seventh collection, ‘Late Love Poems‘, was published by Cinnamon Press this year. It was preceded by a week-by-week uploading to YouTube of thirty short films of performances of poems from the book, filmed in a range of settings and styles by Eamon Bourke of Park6Productions and funded by Arts Council England.

Audiences online were not great, but not bad. However, a group of the films were markedly less viewed. They were concerned with sickness and encroaching disability. They were poems and films of lament, defiance and celebration, and form a significant but unexpected part of the book. Feedback from those who did view them was positive.

They were integral to a book of poems of rediscovered love, and took a long look at some of the ways our lives can be derailed, the challenge of that, and the ways you can be sustained in adversity as a couple by previously unsuspected resources. There is loss, anger, plenty of that, and a surprising amount of laughter. Love’s taken to a new, darker place and comes back changed.

Understandably, online many viewers are expecting, enticed by the word ‘love’, to sign up for a simple celebration – for the films to be an easy, unquestioning, perhaps sentimental and/or sexy ride. A mirror of wish fulfilment. But stuff happens, complexity happens: we deal with it. Celebration of what we are and what we have, and have had, is not easily won in what is sometimes a ruined landscape. ‘The Harrowing of the Squamous Cell Carcinoma’ was the least viewed film in the YouTube series. It’s an intimidating title for a poem of affirmation and laughter; and it’s filmed in a deliberately idyllic setting.

A strong supporter of the film project, Nadia Kingsley of Fair Acre Press, commented that we underestimated the obstacle of the culture of social media being ‘predominantly used by younger audiences, who most definitely won’t want to know about old people finding love’.

The thin audience made me think about the difference between the medium of the poem on the page, and that of the lined face filmed in closeup delivering the poem. The physical exposure casts a particular light on the words. This both opens up and closes down possibilities. It confronts the reader / viewer with vistas for further interpretation, but it also defines in a way that may be limiting, particularly to the reader’s imaginative response to the printed page. In some cases, the poet’s appearance may bring a deep shift of focus, towards the poet and away from the mutuality of the love poem.

The theme of age – of love not in the first flush of youth – is explored extensively in the poems, and often mocked affectionately, as is the poet’s remembered youth. But we discovered what a risky undertaking it was to find a balance in film between on one hand ‘exhibiting’ the poet and potentially undermining poems which have nothing to do with age, and on the other directly confronting themes of age, illness and indeed mortality that are an essential part of the fabric of many of the poems. Ageism plays its part in the audience response to this exploration. This is not new: it is a part of the egotism of youth. We who are old were not innocent of it once. The films provoke thought in this respect – and perhaps dismissal – far more than the poems.

Sometimes this resulted in interesting collisions. ‘A pair for bodies‘ is a poem in two parts – two related films – which muse on the theme of mature love: the surprise of it, the tenderness of an intimacy of bodies that have got miles on the clock. There’s humour, as there is in all bodies but especially mature ones. Eamon Bourke’s film approaches this with sensitivity while acknowledging a reality that’s brutal as well as beautiful: the poet, the subject of the camera, is not young and it shows. The second part acknowledges and celebrates the idea of wear and tear, a quality of light on the surface of old stone that derives somehow from long existence – and the intimation of a wearing out, contemplated both directly and affectionately. The film takes this cue with a slow, eloquent visual metaphor out of Selinunte, an ancient Greek settlement on the coast of Sicily.

We found that my ‘surface’ had more life in close-up, in a way that added dimensions to the delivery of the poem. But the scale and variety of the 30 poems and films offered an opportunity to convey many faces (as well as none), the many surface dimensions of a personality, just as the face is shaped by many events. It was an antidote to vanity and to defensiveness. The poems are already a study of how we see ourselves – in particular our consciousness of ourselves as we age, and the different kinds of beauty – or reality – in that. At their best, the films added to this in a way that made me see my own face (and the undeniable mark of cancer on my head), though often painfully, in a more detached and painterly way. Through film, these surfaces offered perspectives that wove around the poems in ways I hadn’t expected. The poems swim on at their different depths.

Sharon Morris’s poems and photography in this issue bury deep into the Preseli hills. Here Morris uncovers signs of great significance in poems haunted in two languages by a mother and a culture past – a very ancient past. Preseli is particularly dense in Neolithic signs: the Bluestone quarry of Carn Meini that produced the stone transported to Salisbury Plain to make Stonehenge, the tomb of Pentre Ifan, tumuli, cairns, standing stones and circles, dolmens. They make a kind of obscure poetry – a language where the meaning is now ambiguous, uncertain. We don’t know very much about the meaning of these stones only that they were made and moved by humans, people with a shared culture important enough to be erected in a hefty material far more durable than paper or pixels.

Signs that point to more than one possible conclusion happen to be explored elsewhere in this issue. ‘Exit’ by Menna Elfyn connects a lifetime of possibilities of what the sign and the letter X may signal – X is ‘an alien letter’ to the poet growing up in Welsh, X is heaven, a ‘dazzling azimuth’. Later the departed leave through the side door of the crematorium, exiting forever. In SIGNS LIKE THESE , reviewed in these pages, David Greenslade understands the tricksy fun of the sign-as-poem. A sign in an unfamiliar language, an alien letter, or a sign that confuses, with no discernable meaning, these are the doubled-up pieces of language that poetry loves to deal with.

The multidirectional signalling of poem-as-sign or sign-as-poem is not only visual. This issue includes a focus on poetry and disability. The essays, reviews and poems here – by Cath Nichols, Giles Turnbull and Kobus Moolman – remind me that people experience the language-word by multiple perceptual routes and degrees and not everyone shares the same precise embodiment or perceptual dimension as I do. And no matter how disconnected I can feel doing the majority of my reading at a computer all day, their writing, together with Meirion Jordan’s in this issue, reminds me that all language is experienced in the body.

In one of Sharon Morris’s photographs a woman holds her hand over her face. She faces the camera square-on but obscures us from her expression. Does the hand hide or shield? The gestures of the body are also an ambiguous poetic language. But this language is temporary. Whether we leave through the sidedoor of the crematorium or are left ‘excarnate’ in the wild in a stone tomb, only our signs, marks left in the world, are left behind. And also our love. Sharon Morris:

We visit
the cul-de-sac
of bungalows
at Newport,
take a photo
with a mobile phone —
that’s all it takes
to enter through the eye
into the heartyn ddistaw
and stay thereyn agos.

Arriving in Rotterdam for 2016’s Poetry International (7th – 10th June 2016) it felt refreshing, at first, to escape the shrill and anxiety-inducing debate on the UK’s future in or outside the European Union. Of course it’s what most people asked me about once there. But to enter poetry’s dimension for a few days was relief. Not because it transported me away from the conversation of political complexity, (there is no escape, we are all connected), but because it placed me more deeply within it.

Poetry realises language’s complexity. Speaking at the festival on the panel ‘Newspeak’ the Swedish poet Aase Berg described how in her upbringing language was used in a very simple fashion – black and white, good and bad. It was either us or them. Her rebellion was to invent new words, pushing them together, new language with new meanings. Her radical poetry now forces transformation out of the language of advertising, the internet and other sterile discourses.

The theme of the festival was Newspeak – a provocation under the name of the language in George Orwell’s 1984. The aim with Newspeak was that there would be no double meanings, no ambiguity where unorthodox thinking may develop. Of course the nature of language – formed in the mouths of humans who are infinitely shifty – dooms Newspeak to failure. Even Newspeak has a double meaning to me now: New-speak also now suggests News-speak, the language of the media.

In some ways the current use of language in the political-media sphere is a new Newspeak in that it simplifies and converts complexity to soundbites, tweets, slogans, rumour. In the EU referendum campaign, the complex interaction of bureaucracy and people that is the UK’s relationship with the EU and Europe was condensed into seemingly simple ideas like ‘economy’ or ‘immigration’. For the Leave campaign it was reduced to the idea of ‘control’.

Meanwhile poets like Aase Berg hack this language. She enters ‘perverted, simplified’ discourses such as those available on the dark web, in the how-to-get-rich or self-help books. She listens to the language therein, refashioning the words for her own strange and sometimes dystopian poetry. She is interested in the metaphor of hacking as a way of taking down capitalist patriarchy from the inside like a parasite.

In the same talk on Newspeak, Canadian poet Lisa Robertson noted the recent change of words in France where ‘strike’ has been replaced by ‘social movement’ in the media. What does this do? What meanings does this change or erase and what new connotations does that shift bring, how does it suit the agenda of those using it? Another contributor to the same discussion, young Dutch poet Maarten van der Graaff, spoke about getting ‘dirty’ down at the level of language’s multiplicity. He interrogated the hidden hierarchy in the hyphen in ‘Judeo-Christian’, whereby Jewish culture is secondary to the Christian and other cultures – Muslim, secular etc – are excluded altogether.

The poets here were paying close attention to the language of Newspeak. This is the work of the listening poet. The discussion made me think again about the often-simplified key words in the EU debate – ‘control’, ‘country’, ‘future’, ‘migrant’. ‘Control’ was supposed to stand for democracy, something we all want more of – a say in the future of our communities. But what has been promised – a British exit from the European Union – is not going to bring people democratic control to their lives, it will not give individuals agency under global capitalism. And ‘control’ of course also suggests enforcement, policed borders, state violence…

In language everything is connected to everything else – this is why doublethink was probably never going to be eradicated from the Newspeak dictionary despite the best efforts of the characters in 1984. Words cannot be cut loose from other words, neither can people, neither can countries. The isles that make up Wales, England, Scotland and Northern Island are connected. The seas are being crossed continually, dangerously. We cannot cut ourselves loose from other cultures, cannot say ‘here we are on our own, this is Britain and it means just this one thing alone: Britain’. We cannot deny the other meanings and contradictions. Everything is connected.

Solipsism, newspeak and an illusion of simple nationalistic ‘control’ will not save us from the violence of capital, climate change and war. Or to put it as Abdel-Ilah Salhi the Moroccan poet at the festival in his poem ‘Running in the opposite direction of beer’:

‘Astray like dogs. We opposed all directions and lost more awareness.’

and

‘Stupidity is not enough excuse in the face of all of this crumbling.’